Bloomberg Center for Cities

Building Resilient Workforces Through Place-Based Economic Policy

An event of the Bloomberg Center for Cities

In-person registration

Virtual registration


12:00 p.m.
Bloomberg Center for Cities, Taubman Third Floor, Harvard Kennedy School

About the Event

Co-sponsored with Reimagining the Economy and the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy.

As jobs are created, transformed, and displaced—often accelerated by AI—cities face urgent choices about how to address economic distress and build resilient, productive workforces. This event explores place-based approaches that help cities partner with community colleges and employers, align workforce efforts to local labor market needs, and use data to make clearer decisions about what to scale, adapt, or stop. Gain research insights and explore Economy in Place, an open-access data visualization platform that helps practitioners compare economic conditions across U.S. regions and commuting zones. The discussion will focus on how cities can redesign budgets and implement countercyclical workforce policies that expand training capacity during downturns to support durable, locally grounded growth.

Virtual event open to all. The in-person event is open to all Harvard University ID holders.

Registration is requested as space is limited.

Doors open and lunch available at 11:45 a.m. The program begins at 12:00 p.m.

We welcome individuals with accessibility needs to participate in our events. Contact us at events@cities.harvard.edu to request accommodations or if you have questions.

Speakers

Jorrit de Jong (remarks)

Director, Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University Faculty Co-Chair, Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative Emma Bloomberg Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management, Harvard Kennedy School

Jorrit de Jong is director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University and the Emma Bloomberg Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management at Harvard Kennedy School. His research, teaching, and engagement with practice focus on the challenges of making the public sector more effective, efficient, equitable, and responsive to social needs.

His scholarly research has been published in academic journals such as Public Administration Review, Cities, Public Management Review, Administration & Society, Stanford Social Innovation Review, International Journal of Public Administration, and the Journal of Public Health Management and Policy. A specialist in experiential learning, Jorrit has taught strategic management and public problem-solving in degree courses and executive education programs at Harvard and around the world.

Since 2016, Jorrit has been director and faculty co-chair of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, a joint program of Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School, funded by and executed in collaboration with Bloomberg Philanthropies. Over 300 mayors and their senior teams have participated in this year-long program designed to help cities tackle pressing problems.

Jorrit has designed and led field labs on neighborhood development, organized crime, human trafficking and other social issues that require multiple agencies to innovate together. As director of the Center for Government Studies at Leiden University, Jorrit co-founded the Kafka Brigade, an action research team that helped governments in the Netherlands and the UK diagnose and remedy bureaucratic dysfunction. Before that, he was founding co-director of a start-up technology firm for public sector innovation in Amsterdam.

Jorrit holds a PhD in Public Policy and Management (VU Amsterdam), a Master in Philosophy (Leiden) and a Master in Public Administration (Leiden). He has written extensively, including the books The State of Access: Success and Failure of Democracies to Create Equal Opportunities (Brookings 2008, co-edited); Agents of Change: Strategy and Tactics for Social Innovation (Brookings 2012, co-authored); and Dealing with Dysfunction: Innovative Problem Solving in the Public Sector (Brookings, 2016). Jorrit co-developed more than 60 teaching cases, simulation exercises, toolkits and learning modules on governance and leadership.

Gordon Hanson

Gordon Hanson (presenter/discussant)

Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy and Academic Dean for Strategy and Engagement, Harvard Kennedy School

Gordon H. Hanson is the Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy (Remembrance for Peter Wertheim) and Academic Dean for Strategy and Engagement at Harvard Kennedy School. He is best known for his research on the labor market consequences of globalization, including pioneering work on the China trade shock. Hanson’s current research addresses the causes and consequences of regional job loss, the effectiveness of place-based policies in alleviating regional economic distress, and how the energy transition will affect local labor markets. This work is part of the Reimagining the Economy project at the Kennedy School, which Hanson co-directs with Dani Rodrik. Hanson’s related scholarship touches upon immigration, the globalization of production, and economic geography. He has published extensively in top economics journals, is widely cited for his research by scholars from across the social sciences and is frequently quoted in major media outlets. Hanson is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and past co-editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Development Economics. He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1992 and his BA in economics from Occidental College in 1986. Prior to joining Harvard in 2020, he spent two decades at UC San Diego, where held the Pacific Economic Cooperation Chair in International Economic Relations at UC San Diego and was founding director of the Center on Global Transformation. Hanson previously served on the economics faculties of the University of Michigan and the University of Texas.

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